Stuyvesant High School Admitted 762 New Students. Only 7 Are Black.



Troy Closson:

About 10 percent of offers to New York City’s most elite public high schools went to Black and Latino students this year, education officials announced on Thursday, in a school system where they make up more than two-thirds of the student population overall.

The numbers — which have remained stubbornly low for years — placed a fresh spotlight on racial and ethnic disparities in the nation’s largest school system.

At Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the most selective of the city’s so-called specialized schools, seven of the 762 offers made went to Black students, down from 11 last year and eight in 2021. Twenty Latino students were offered spots at Stuyvesant, as were 489 Asian students and 158 white students. The rest went to multiracial students and students whose race was unknown.

Gaps at many of the other schools were also stark: Out of 287 offers made at Staten Island Technical High School, for example, two Black students were accepted — up from zero last year — along with seven Latino students.




Deep Sleep May Be the Best Defense Against Alzheimer’s



Allysia Finley:

Shakespeare described sleep as “the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing.” New research suggests it may also be a key nutrient in warding off Alzheimer’s disease.

Poor sleep has long been linked to Alzheimer’s, but the relationship is akin to the chicken-and-egg conundrum. It isn’t clear which came first. During deep sleep, the brain produces slow electrical waves and flushes out neurotoxins including amyloid and tau, two hallmarks of the disease.

Studies have shown that even one night of lousy deep sleep can lead to an increase of amyloid. A week of disrupted sleep can raise the amount of tau, which is especially insidious because over time it can strangle neurons from the inside out.

Those with Alzheimer’s experience sleep disturbances years before they develop cognitive symptoms, but the pathology that underlies the disease can itself disrupt sleep. Poor sleep, then, may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s and be an early symptom of it. It’s also possible that those who are at higher genetic risk for the disease are more prone to sleep disturbances.




Wisconsin graduates reflect on the pandemic, social justice and mental health challenges



Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison emptied its dorms in March 2020, instructing students to hunker down at home.

Freshman Isaac Wells-Cage didn’t have a home to go to. His mom was in the hospital, his dad was out of the picture, so he shared an apartment with a friend.

While in some ways, his pandemic experience was similar to classmates — he listened to lectures from bed and had swabs stuck up his nose for required COVID testing — he weathered things differently because of all he had already been through.

“Those experiences, they’re definitely monumental and they matter,” Wells-Cage said. “But in comparison to what I’ve experienced in life, it’s just, like, another day.”

His mother struggled with schizophrenia, so he lived in a foster home from ages 4 to 8. When he moved back with his mom, their living situation was always temporary: sometimes an apartment, sometimes a group home or homeless shelter. Wells-Cage grew up in a slice of northwestern Milwaukee where 95% of residents are Black. It’s a place that’s been subjected to decades of redlining and systemic racism, where two-thirds of the children live in poverty and the reputation as one of the country’s most incarcerated ZIP codes has stuck for years.




New York is the latest large city to join a national push to change how children are taught to read. But principals and teachers may resist uprooting old practices.



Troy Closson:

As New York embarks on an ambitious plan to overhaul how children in the nation’s largest school system are taught to read, schools leaders face a significant obstacle: educators’ skepticism.

Dozens of cities and states have sought to transform reading instruction in recent years, driven by decades of research known as the “science of reading.” But the success of their efforts has hinged in part on whether school leaders are willing to embrace a seismic shift in their philosophy about how children learn.

Already in New York City, the rollout has frustrated principals. The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, is forcing schools to abandon strategies he says are a top reason half of students in grades three to eight are not proficient in reading.

But principals will lose control over selecting reading programs at their schools, and their union has criticized the speed of change. And many educators still believe in “balanced literacy,” a popular approach that aims to foster a love of books through independent reading time but that experts and the chancellor say lacks enough focus on foundational skills.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




A lawsuit filed by the mother of a 15-year-old girl states her daughter was “attacked and severely beaten” by a 17-year-old male in the girl’s restroom of Edmond Memorial High School in Oklahoma.



Oklahoma County District Court

Okla. Stat. tit. 70, $1-125 (G) provides, “[a] parent … of a student enrolled in and

physically attending a public school district … shall have a cause of action against the public

school district … for noncompliance with the provisions of subsections B and C of this section.”

10. On or about October 26, 2022, at approximately 7:15 a.m., E.G., a fifteen (15)

year old female student at Edmond Memorial High School (“EMHS) was attacked and severely

beaten by a seventeen (17) year old male transgender student in the designated girls’ bathroom.

11. At the time of the attack, Defendant had actual knowledge that: (a) the male

transgender student identified as a female student; (b) the male transgender student was a male

and not female; (c) the male transgender student’s birth certificate and/or paternity affidavit on file with Defendant identified the male transgender student as a male and not female; (d) the male

transgender student regularly used the girls’ bathroom and not the boys bathroom; and (e) the male transgender student made previous threats of violence against E.G. at Defendant’s school.




“Overall, the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km2 since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area”



Julia R. Andreasen, Anna E. Hogg, and Heather L. Selley:

Antarctic ice shelves provide buttressing support to the ice sheet, stabilising the flow of grounded ice and its contribution to global sea levels. Over the past 50 years, satellite observations have shown ice shelves collapse, thin, and retreat; however, there are few measurements of the Antarctic-wide change in ice shelf area. Here, we use MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite data to measure the change in ice shelf calving front position and area on 34 ice shelves in Antarctica from 2009 to 2019. Over the last decade, a reduction in the area on the Antarctic Peninsula (6693 km2) and West Antarctica (5563 km2) has been outweighed by area growth in East Antarctica (3532 km2) and the large Ross and Ronne–Filchner ice shelves (14 028 km2). The largest retreat was observed on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, where 5917 km2 of ice was lost during an individual calving event in 2017, and the largest area increase was observed on Ronne Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, where a gradual advance over the past decade (535 km2yr−1) led to a 5889 km2 area gain from 2009 to 2019. Overall, the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km2 since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area. Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade, whereas the steady-state approach would estimate substantial ice loss over the same period, demonstrating the importance of using time-variable calving flux observations to measure change.




Censorship and Princeton



Washington Free Beacon

Eisgruber and Princeton, of course, made headlines last May when the school dismissed a star classics professor, Joshua Katz, who had been a vocal critic of the school’s racial politics. The reason given for the ouster—Katz’s consensual affair with a former student decades earlier—was widely seen as pretextual, and pundits accused Princeton of retaliating against a tenured faculty member for political speech.

Eisgruber had publicly condemned an essay Katz wrote in 2020 attacking the university’s campus activists. And Princeton had included the professor on a list of racists—presented to freshmen at a mandatory orientation session—who’d allegedly harmed the school’s good name.

That history was one of many ironies in a tone-deaf speech. Set aside Eisgruber’s facile distortion of laws like Florida’s, which bar public school instruction on gender identity. It takes a special kind of blindness, hypocrisy, and sheer partisan animus to conclude in this day and age that Republicans are the biggest threat to free expression on college campuses.




No Excuses: Race & Reckoning at a Chicago Charter School



Educate:

Producer DJ Cashmere spent seven years teaching Black and brown students at a Noble Street charter high school in Chicago. At the time, Noble followed a popular model called “no excuses.” Its schools required strict discipline but promised low-income students a better shot at college. After DJ left the classroom to become a journalist, Noble disavowed its own policies — calling them “assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist, and anti-black.” In this hour, DJ, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. And he seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.




Question the data….



“It’s crazy to say people can’t talk about it, but that is what YouTube has been doing.” Many taxpayer supported K-12 systems use Google/YouTube services, including Madison.




Taking Charge of Your Children’s Education



Colleen Hroncich

My oldest child is graduating from college tomorrow, so it has me thinking about our educational journey—which could best be described as eclectic. At various times, we used private school, district school, and cyber charter school. But we ultimately landed on homeschooling. That doesn’t mean they were literally learning at home every day. My kids participated in co‐​ops, hybrid classes, dual enrollment, athletics, and more. This gave them access to experts and plenty of social time.

It can be scary taking charge of your children’s education—I remember feeling very relieved when my oldest received her first college acceptance. But today there are more resources than you can imagine to help you create the best education plan for your children’s individual needs and interests. And with the growth of education entrepreneurship, the situation is getting even better.

For starters, you don’t have to go it alone. The growth of microschools and hybrid schools means there are flexible learning options in many areas that previously had none. One goal of the Friday Feature is to help parents see the diversity of educational options that exist. To see what’s available in your area, you can search online, check with friends and neighbors, or connect with a local homeschool group.




Childhood in the 70’s



Michael Weingrad:

The Seventies were less enlightened.
Back then we thought biology
Determined sex, and (don’t be frightened)
We called men “he” and women “she.”
In general, our social mores
Were still adapting to the forays
Of feminism’s second wave.
We worked out how we should behave,
Though, not from academic panels
Or gender theorists. No, our source
For moral wisdom was of course
That holy trinity of channels
(With PBS a fourth) by which
Our culture spilled into its ditch.

Indeed, the sentimental journey
That was my early childhood
Commenced with Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie
And wandered through the neighborhood
Where Mister Rogers hung his sweaters,
Electric companies taught letters,
And chubbildrubben subbang “zoom.”
Then, seeking some more elbow room
(Just like the song from Schoolhouse Rock goes)
It crossed the ocean to Japan
Where champions like Ultraman,
The Goldar team, and Johnny Sokko’s
Robotic pal would fight to cleanse
The earth of evil aliens.




Graduation Speeches, “Hate Speech,” and the CUNY Law Controversy



Eugene Volokh:

There’s been a good deal of comment about the City University of New York law school student graduation speaker (Fatima Mousa Mohammed) who devoted a good deal of her speech to harshly condemning Israel and “Zionism,” as well as capitalism, the New York government, and America more generally. (I include the transcript of the speech and a link to the video at the end of this post.)

Beyond just the criticism, the CUNY Board of Trustees and Chancellor put out a statementsaying,

Free speech is precious, but often messy, and is vital to the foundation of higher education.

Hate speech, however, should not be confused with free speech and has no place on our campuses or in our city, our state or our nation.

The remarks by a student-selected speaker at the CUNY Law School graduation, unfortunately, fall into the category of hate speech as they were a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race or political affiliation.

The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York condemns such hate speech.

This speech is particularly unacceptable at a ceremony celebrating the achievements of a wide diversity of graduates, and hurtful to the entire CUNY community, which was founded on the principle of equal access and opportunity. CUNY’s commitment to protecting and supporting our students has not wavered throughout our 175-year existence and we cannot and will not condone hateful rhetoric on our campuses.

A few thoughts:




Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis



Harold Robertson:

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society. 

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon. 

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results




A Visual Breakdown of America’s Stagnating Number of Births



Anthony DeBarros::

About 3.66 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2022, essentially unchanged from 2021 and 15% below the peak hit in 2007, according to new federal figures released Thursday.

The provisional total—3,661,220 births—is about 3,000 below 2021’s final count, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Final government data expected later this year could turn that small deficit positive.

Experts have pointed to a confluence of factors behind the nation’s recent relative dearth of births, including economic and social obstacles ranging from child care to housing affordability.

Absent increases in immigration, fewer births combined with ongoing baby boomer retirements will likely weigh on the labor force supply within the next 10 years, said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, an insurance and financial-services company.

“You’re going to have a real shortage of workers unless we have technology somehow to fill the gap,” Bostjancic said.

A look at the trends in charts:




Commentary on Wisconsin taxpayer funded k-12 spending growth over the years



I’ve long found these posts rather curious in light of I Madison’s “more than most” k-12 tax & spending practices: now > $25k per student, amidst declining enrollment. In 2007, we Madisonians spent 333,101,865 for K-12. Inflation adjusted $486,328,722, today. Yet our current budget is $557,015,538 (it is higher every time I look). Readers interested in a deeper dive might find the topic of cost disease worth a look.

“Wisconsin Watch” channels two sources: the Wisconsin Policy Forum” and “Wisconsin Public Radio”

As ever, we are in budget season:

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Planned Parenthood: 1947






“It would be a real mistake to think that when you’re teaching a child, all you are doing is adjusting the weights in a network.”



Madhumita Murgia

Chiang’s main objection, a writerly one, is with the words we choose to describe all this. Anthropomorphic language such as “learn”, “understand”, “know” and personal pronouns such as “I” that AI engineers and journalists project on to chatbots such as ChatGPT create an illusion. This hasty shorthand pushes all of us, he says — even those intimately familiar with how these systems work — towards seeing sparks of sentience in AI tools, where there are none.

“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”

So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.

“It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.




Summer Reading List



Rob Long:

To all Valley Vista Middle School parents:

As you are no doubt aware, the current cultural and political climate has made it very difficult for our faculty to come up with a summer reading list that can be enthusiastically embraced by all families in our Valley Vista community.

In compiling the following list, we have tried to be sensitive to the needs and concerns of the rainbow of cultures and values that make Valley Vista such a richly diverse place. Working with parents and guardians from all faiths and traditions and balancing the wishes and standards for everyone in the community has been a challenging task, but it’s one we’ve joyfully accepted.




Virginia will eliminate degree requirements and preferences for nearly 90% of classified jobs — salaried positions subject to the Virginia Personnel Act



David Ress:

The change by the Richmond region’s largest employer will take effect July 1 for the roughly 20,000 openings the state advertises over the course of a year.

“This key reform will expand opportunities for qualified applicants who are ready to serve Virginians,” said Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

“This landmark change in hiring practices for our state workforce will improve hiring processes, expand possibilities and career paths for job seekers and enhance our ability to deliver quality services,” he said.




Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration



Stephen J. Ceci, Shulamit Kahn, and Wendy M. Williams

We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people’s opinions about sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as an omnipresent factor limiting women’s progress in the tenure-track academy. Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science. Given the substantial resources directed toward reducing gender bias in academic science, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of when and where such efforts are justified and of how resources can best be directed to mitigate sexism when and where it exists.




A look at Christopher Rufo



Isabela Dias:

His documentary America Lost opens with sentimental home movie footage—Rufo’s young parents holding hands and walking, his father cuddling infant Chris. Rufo narrates how he was “born into the American Dream,” where his penniless immigrant father gained a life of prosperity. Then his tone becomes ominous, and family archival images are replaced with what he calls “the lost American interior”—night scenes of police cars, ambulances, and homeless people. “We are coming apart economically to be sure,” he says, “but we are coming apart as a culture.” As the film progresses, he describes these places as suffering on a “deeply personal, human, even spiritual” level, one hastened by the erosion of religious community and the two-­parent family. He hoped the movie—which received funding from right-wing foundations that support the Manhattan Institute, where Rufo now leads an anti-CRT initiative—would “reshape the way we think about American poverty.”

“I started the film as a libertarian,” Rufo saidduring a 2020 online screening, “and I finished the film as a conservative.” Along with his political evolution, Rufo was contemplating a career change. In his telling, the left-leaning documentary space had become inhospitable for a newfound conservative. He had relocated to blue Seattle, where his Thai-born wife, Suphatra, had a job with Microsoft, and he found an intellectual home within a right-wing network always ready to bring a professed convert into the fold. He secured a 2017 Claremont Institute fellowship (same class as Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe) and a role with the Discovery Institute, a think tank based in his new hometown and known for promoting the anti-evolution concept of “intelligent design,” becoming director of its Center on Wealth & Poverty. Rufo also started writing for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and later landed a fellowship with the Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, would go on to describe him as a “master storyteller” of the conservative movement.

“My whole world opened up,” he toldpsychologist and conservative guru Jordan Peterson. “I felt like I had the freedom to think for the first time as an adult.” While making a movie took years, channeling his storytelling skills toward commentary on social justice and political issues offered more instant results.

For Rufo, progressive Seattle became a convenient punching bag. His work for the Discovery Institute and City Journal focused on the city’s homelessness crisis, criticizing the “ruinous compassion” of “socialist intellectuals” who pushed for more housing as a salve. “We must look at homelessness not as a problem to be solved, but a problem to be contained,” Rufo wrote in October 2018. “The backlash is coming,” he predicted.




DIE vs Merit



David Glasser:

The University of Southern California is prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion over merit and talent when awarding funding to students in PhD programs, according to a group of scholars who recently sounded the alarm on the issue as well as a memo that spells out the practice.

While dozens of universities consider DEI when distributing funding to PhD students for research, USC is “particularly extreme” in this regard, USC Professor James Moore, Columbia University Professor Spiro Pantazatos, and former USC doctoral candidate Kursat Christoff Pekgoz wrote in an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed on May 18.

“Our review of more than 30 graduate school websites for leading U.S. research universities suggests that while most leading institutions dedicate some share of resources to funding mostly or exclusively students from underrepresented groups, USC’s reliance on group identity to define eligibility for centralized doctoral support is particularly extreme,” the professors wrote.

A February 2022 memo sent by University of Southern California leaders to graduate program faculty details how. The elite, private school used to have two separate PhD funding programs, one specifically to advance DEI and another largely merit-based.




“Let’s Improve Student Engagement”



Harrington Shaw:

Undergraduate student engagement is on the decline. That’s according to the publishing and research firm Wiley, which, in February, released a “State of the Student” survey indicating that student engagement remains a “significant challenge” as universities have returned to in-person instruction. Wiley’s researchers found that more schools are facing enrollment and retention issues, as students are unsure which programs to pursue amid economic and emotional insecurity. Alarmingly, more than half of surveyed undergraduates indicated that they struggle to “stay engaged and interested in their classes,” while nearly half are concerned about keeping up with coursework.

As Inside Higher Ed noted in its own coverage of the study, students’ responses indicated a strong desire for a greater career-preparatory focus in their college classes. Wiley reported that students are “looking for current, relevant content that’s applicable to the real world and promotes interaction.” One-quarter of students stated that their educational experience would be improved if professors focused more on the applications of course material rather than on theoretical study.

Many institutions fail to educate students about the value of a college education.

Students also expressed a desire for more “company-led projects,” demonstrating their increasing focus on job skills, work experience, and professional certificate exam preparation. Activities like case studies, interactions with professionals, and workplace simulations were all suggested by students as productive uses of their instructional time.

There are, of course, solutions to this student engagement crisis, some of which are already in motion. First, higher-education institutions should work to reduce costs so that students can focus on school without having to work outside of class to afford tuition. Enabling students to spend more time studying and socializing will empower them to better understand material and meaningfully participate in class, in addition to forming more tightly knit learning communities.




Taxpayer funded CDC and Covid policy teacher union emails






School Choice



Robert Pondisco:

A new study from the Texas Public Policy Foundation is a reminder that the most persuasive argument in favor of school choice is not the promise of higher test scores, the beneficial effects of competition, or even an escape hatch from failing public schools—it’s the power of choice to make a more satisfying range of school cultures and curriculum available than traditional public schools can accommodate.

For years, wonkish arguments for school choice mostly revolved around enhanced performance. Researchers and policymakers have long built the case for (or against) choice based on test scores or other measurable metrics to demonstrate that choice “works.” The rapid growth of charter schools, for example, has long been framed as a moral imperative: a lifeboat to rescue students from failing schools, and a means of pressuring traditional public schools to improve or lose students to competition. More recently, some have offered choice as a means of disarming combatants in our ongoing “culture wars.” This train of thought brings us a little closer to putting school culture and curriculum at the center of the case for choice, but it still treats those things as a means, not an end in itself.

These common arguments for choice are lost on those actually doing the choosing. An analysis of the growth of classical charter schools in Texas by Albert Cheng and Cassidy Syftestad, suggests that parents are choosing those schools because of the intrinsic appeal of an education for their children grounded in the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. The pair surveyed 431 parents with children enrolled in Texas classical charter schools and convened focus groups for 25 of them to discuss their educational priorities for their children and what they liked or disliked about their child’s school. They found that “parents’ educational priorities aligned with the priorities of classical education,” which has seen a big spike in demand in Texas and elsewhere. Parents expressed “strong desires for their children to grow in wisdom and virtue,” they explain.




Lightfoot will teach as a Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.



Jeramie Bizzle:

She will teach a course titled “Health Policy, and Leadership,” according to the school. 

“I’m delighted to welcome Mayor Lightfoot to Harvard Chan School as a Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow. As mayor, she showed strong leadership in advocating for health, equity, and dignity for every resident of Chicago, from her declaration of structural racism as a public health crisis to her innovative initiative to bring mental health services to libraries and shelters. And of course, she led the city through the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Michelle A. Williams, Dean of Faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Lightfoot expressed her excitement about her new role.

Chesa Boudin joins UC-Berkeley Law School




Civics: Vivek Ramaswamy’s LinkedIn Lockout



Wall Street Journal:

LinkedIn cited three posts and videos by Mr. Ramaswamy. In one, he argues that if adherents to “climate religion” really cared about the climate, “they’d be worried about, say, shifting oil production from the U.S. to places like Russia and China.” In another he says “fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.” In a third, he says China played the U.S. like a “mandolin” and “weaponized the ‘woke pandemic.’”

You can disagree with such lines or think they are over the top, but they’re well within the realm of political debate. They’re hardly extreme next to President Biden’s argument that Georgia is imposing “Jim Crow 2.0” on its black citizens, or Democrats’ ubiquitous claim that climate change poses an “existential” threat that has to be solved in the next X years, or else kiss humanity goodbye.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s team asked LinkedIn what exactly is misleading about those snippets. The company replied: “We can’t interpret the LinkedIn User Agreement or Professional Community Policies for you or tell you how it would be applied in any hypothetical situation.” The platform promised, however, to unfreeze his account and “grant another chance” if he replied by “expressly stating that you agree to abide by our Terms going forward.”




Why won’t Google give a straight answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?



Eli Mackinnon;

Google replied to the tweet directly, saying, “Bard is an early experiment based on Large Language Models and will make mistakes. It is not trained on Gmail data. -JQ”.Much of the follow-on media coverage ran with this response and dutifully “debunked” Bard’s claim that its training data included Gmail data. Few articles professed skepticism around Google’s public denial of Bard’s claim, despite the fact that Google has been fined on numerous occasions by government agencies around the world specifically for making deceptive claims about its privacy practices that are later proven to be misleading.Given this context, the narrative that Bard’s claim was an open-and-shut case of AI hallucination is, at best, hasty and incomplete. A fuller investigation reveals (i) documented use of Gmail data in otherGoogle AI models that makes speculation around its use in Bard reasonable, and (ii) the habitual use of artfully ambiguous language in its public representations around Bard’s data sources, language that never actually rules out the use of Gmail data in its training set.




The apparent impending demise of The King’s College is instructive about the pitfalls lying in wait for even the best-intentioned institutions of higher education.



Peter Wood:

Every college and university has a history. Students and faculty members typically have only a hazy idea of what came before their time, but that history still bears down on the present. TKC was founded in the 1930s by a popular radio minister. It moved several times before acquiring a campus up the Hudson at Briarcliff Manor. As a consequence of some bad financial planning, the college closed in the mid 1990s, but it kept its New York State charter. In the late 1990s, with financing from the Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”), the college re-opened on several floors of the Empire State Building. 

At that point the college had a campus of sorts, a handful of staff and faculty, a lot of unwarranted confidence, and very few realistic ideas about how to proceed. It tried a variety of contradictory approaches loosely centered on the idea that it was going to bring Christian higher education to the heart of Manhattan. But it had no coherent curriculum or any compelling reason for students to attend. The figure from Cru who had engineered the college’s re-opening, J. Stanley Oakes, slowly came to grips with the problem. He settled on the idea that TKC would strive to be an academically rigorous college that would serve students whose profiles would have fit them for elite liberal arts colleges but who wanted an explicitly Christian education. “Christian” in this context meant something like “evangelical Protestant” with something of a Baptist flavor. 

I was at the time serving as associate provost and the president’s chief of staff at Boston University. I had never heard of TKC, but Oakes had heard of me, and in his view I fit like a key into the lock: an evangelical Christian with considerable administrative experience in a large secular university. He offered me the provost’s position at TKC and I said no.

But after a few years of saying no and after various unwelcome changes at my secular university, I decided to give TKC a try. Oakes offered me a free hand in recruiting faculty and developing the curriculum, and he was as good as his word. I offered him the prospect of an intellectually demanding curriculum that would quickly weed out the students who were not up for the adventure.




Civics: Federal Judge Makes History in Holding That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant



Sophia Cope:

In analyzing the government’s interests in gaining warrantless access to cell phone data at the border, the Smith court considered the traditional justifications for the border search exception: in the words of the judge, “preventing unwanted persons or items from entering the country.” In particular, the government has a strong interest in conducting warrantless searches of luggage and other containers to identify goods subject to customs duty (import tax) and items considered contraband or that would otherwise be harmful if brought into the country such as drugs or weapons. 

Considering these traditional rationales for the border search exception in the context of modern cell phones, the Smith court concluded that the government’s “interest in searching the digital data ‘contained’ on a particular physical device located at the border is relatively weak.”

The court focused on the internet and cloud storage, stating: “Stopping the cell phone from entering the country would not … mean stopping the data contained on it from entering the country” because any data that can be found on a cell phone—even digital contraband—“very likely does exist not just on the phone device itself, but also on faraway computer servers potentially located within the country.” This is different from physical items that if searched without a warrant may be efficiently interdicted, and thereby actually prevented from entering the country.




The University of Austin hopes to upend the existing higher-education model.



Richard Vedder:

Intelligent observers of American higher education know that colleges generally are in great trouble: falling enrollments, declining public and political support, often dubious outcomes, and excessive tuition and other costs. Most depressing, the traditional tolerance of widespread viewpoints and commitment to free expression seem to have declined substantially.

While one finds a few encouraging stories dealing with these issues at existing colleges and universities, the overall picture is bleak. It seems that current institutions are doing too little, if anything, to fix the problem. At many, the outlook is palpably worsening.

In the competitive, free-market, private-business sector, lags in innovation or qualitative improvement are remedied by Schumpeterian “creative destruction” and by new competition. Hence Eastman Kodak has nearly died in photography and Tesla has prospered in automobiles as a consequence of changes in technology and taste.

It seems that current institutions are doing little, if anything, to fix higher education’s problems.

So, too, can new entrants into the collegiate market potentially help to reverse the declining higher-education industry in America. I recently attended a summit of higher-education thinkers and philanthropists sponsored by the new University of Austin (UATX). UATX will admit its first class in the fall of 2024, but it is already doing a number of academic activities—for example, running short summer seminars for crackerjack students at other schools—as a trial run for a future as a full-fledged university.

It is not an ordinary group of academics who are leading UATX’s inception. The founding president, Pano Kanelos, was the former president of the “great books” college St. John’s (Annapolis and Santa Fe). Prestigious academics like Charles Calomiris (Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University) are taking pay cuts to join, full-time, the management and instructional team at UATX.




Taxpayer funded Madison School District‘s “communications” department review



Scott Girard:

The Madison Metropolitan School District is “committed to doing the hard work and restoring the integrity” of its communications team following the release of an employee complaint against spokesperson Tim LeMonds last Friday.

In an unsigned statement posted to its website Thursday and sent via email to reporters by Communications Manager Ian Folger, the district said it “will conduct a full review of the department operations, structure and human interaction in the coming months,” with no more specific timeline.

“At the same time, the District will have significant leadership changes this summer, and through those transitions we will work to reorganize and restore relationships that are essential to our success,” according to the statement. “We will work to build a positive workplace culture for employees.”

Those leadership changes include Superintendent Carlton Jenkins retiring and longtime administrator Lisa Kvistad taking over as interim superintendent during a search for the next permanent leader. Chief Financial Officer Ross MacPherson and General Legal Counsel Sherry Terrell-Webb are among other top leaders leaving this summer.

Dave Cieslewicz:

In fact, in a story last week in Isthmus by Deborah Kades, she reports that when WMTV reporter Elizabeth Wadas approached Jenkins at a public meeting last winter LeMonds prevented her from reaching him. He told her that the meeting was for the public. Wadas informed him that being a reporter did not make her an alien, but apparently to no avail.

LeMonds also leads a communications department for a district that, beyond just LeMonds, seems intent on not communicating. In 2019 a Madison East educator and trip chaperon was found to have placed hidden cameras in the hotel bathrooms of students. The district conducted an investigation to determine if staff followed policy regarding the reporting and follow up on these incidents. The investigation concluded they had, but the district refused to release the report. Parents and students were, understandably, upset. Even school board members were not allowed to read it. Then, inexplicably and in response to another open records request on yet another camera incident, the district released the full report to Isthmus in August of 2021. LeMonds refused to answer Isthmus reporter Dylan Brogan’s questions about it at the time. 

And over a long period, the MMSD holds the dubious distinction of being the least transparent public agency in the state. In March, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council “awarded” the district with its No Friend of Openness (Nopee) award. The council wrote: “It’s rare for a public institution that depends on taxpayer support to be as awful as this one when it comes to public records and accountability. The district, through spokesperson Tim LeMonds, has become notorious for outrageous delays and excuses, prompting multiple lawsuits alleging violations of the records law. Tom Kamenick of the Wisconsin Transparency Project has said he has “received more complaints about MMSD than any other government agency.” It is time for the district’s casual contempt for the public’s right to know to come to a screeching halt.”

Tim LeMonds had good reason to fight the release of a complaint against him. Now he should tell his side of the story.

Chris Rickert:

In a statement released Thursday by district officer of internal communication Ian Folger, the district says “the information shared publicly last week was difficult for all individuals mentioned in the documents, as well as for those who interact with them. It is abundantly clear that there are relational problems within the District’s communications department that need to be addressed.”

Folger said LeMonds remains a full-time district employee and that his role with the district has not changed. He said he could not comment on whether LeMonds is under further investigation by the district, but LeMonds said in a Thursday interview that as far as he knew, he is not.

LeMonds — who in the interview said he was speaking only on behalf of himself — said he has not been subject to any disciplinary action in the wake of the documents’ release and “categorically” denied that he called Stephanie Fryer, the spokesperson for the Madison Police Department, an “idiot,” as was alleged in the court documents.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




“Mississippi has achieved its gains despite ranking 46th in spending per pupil in grades K-12”



Nicholas Kristof visits flyover country:

Mississippi’s success has no single origin moment, but one turning point was arguably when Jim Barksdale decided to retire in the state. A former C.E.O. of Netscape, he had grown up in Mississippi but was humiliated by its history of racism and underperformance.

“My home state was always held in a low regard,” he told me. “I always felt embarrassed by that.”

Barksdale cast about for ways to improve education in the state, and in 2000 he and his wife contributed $100 million to create a reading institute in Jackson that has proved very influential. Beyond the money, he brought to the table a good relationship with officials such as the governor, as well as an executive’s focus on measurement and bang for the buck — and these have characterized Mississippi’s push ever since.

With the support of Barksdale and many others, a crucial milestone came in 2013 when state Republicans pushed through a package of legislation focused on education and when Mississippi recruited a new state superintendent of education, Carey Wright, from the Washington, D.C., school system. Wright ran the school system brilliantly until her retirement last year, meticulously ensuring that all schools actually carried out new policies and improved outcomes.

One pillar of Mississippi’s new strategy was increasing reliance on phonics and a broader approach to literacy called the science of reading, which has been gaining ground around the country; Mississippi was at the forefront of this movement. Wright buttressed the curriculum with a major push for professional development, with the state dispatching coaches to work with teachers, especially at schools that lagged.

Meanwhile, we in Wisconsin spend more for less.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Interesting “Wisconsin Watch” choice school coverage and a very recent public school article



Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism School (along with Marquette University), the formation, affiliation(s) and funding sources of Wisconsin Watch have generated some controversy. Jim Piwowarczyk noted in November, 2022:

“Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-funded UW-Madison campus, has taken more than $1 million from an organization founded by George Soros over the years. Wisconsin Right Now discovered that the group is still prominently pushing out stories by a writer, Howard Hardee, who was dispatched to Wisconsin by a Soros-funded organization to work on “election integrity” stories and projects.” When major media outlets like WTM-TV and the Wisconsin State Journal run stories by Wisconsin Watch or Hardee, they fail to advise readers that he’s a fellow with a Soros-linked group. The group says that “hundreds” of news organizations have shared its stories over the years, giving them wide reach.

The Soros family also boasts significant influence over American media. An analysis from the Media Research Center found numerous media outlets employ journalists who also serve on boards of organizations that receive large amounts of funding from Soros.

More recently, and amidst Wisconsin’s biennial budget deliberations including many billions ($11.97B in 2019! [xlsx] excluding federal and other sources) for traditional government K-12 school districts, Wisconsin Watch writer Phoebe Petrovic posted a number of articles targeting choice (0.797%!! of $11.97B) schools:

May 5, 2023: Considering a Wisconsin voucher school? Here’s what parents of children who are LGBTQ+ or have a disability should know. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 5, 2023: False choice: Wisconsin taxpayers support schools that can discriminate. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 20, 2023: Federal, state law permit disability discrimination in Wisconsin voucher schools. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

## May 22, 2023 via a St Marcus Milwaukee sermon [transcript]- a church family whose incredible student efforts are worth a very deep dive. Compare this to Madison, where we’ve tolerated disastrous reading results for decades despite spending > $25k+/student!

## May 23, 2023: Curious (false claims) reporting on legacy k-12 schools, charter/voucher models and special education via Wisconsin coalition for education freedom. (Focus on 99% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 31, 2023: ‘Unwanted and unwelcome’: Anti-LGBTQ+ policies common at Wisconsin voucher schools. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 31, 2023: Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school options via another Wisconsin Watch writer: Mario Koran. (Focus on 99% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

Related: Governor Evers’ most recent budget proposals have attempted to kill One City Schools’ charter authorization…… and 2010: WEAC $1.57M !! for four state senators.

June 2, 2023 Wisconsin Watch’s Embarrassing Campaign against Vouchers and Christian Schools

Why might civics minded have an interest in funding sources (such as Wisconsin Watch, WILL, ActBlue and so on)?

Two examples:

Billionaire George Soros is taking a stake in the Bernalillo County district attorney’s race, backing Raul Torrez with a $107,000 contribution to an independent expenditure committee.

George Soros, a multibillionaire who has only the most tenuous connection to Colorado, is paying for negative ads against incumbent District Attorney Pete Weir, a Republican, pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the effort.




Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school options



Mario Koran:

Less talked about, however, is how the state’s biggest choice program, open enrollment, excludes students with disabilities. Roughly 70,000 Wisconsin students attend public schools outside their home districts through the 25-year-old open enrollment program. It allows students to apply to better-resourced public schools outside of district boundaries. But those schools can limit or deny slots for out-of-district students with disabilities.

Wisconsin districts in 2021-22 received 41,554 open enrollment applications, about 14% of which represented students with disabilities, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction data show. Schools rejected about 40% of applications in that category, with lack of special education space as the most common reason for the denials. By comparison, school districts rejected only 14% of applications from students without disabilities. 

Last year, for example, one suburban Madison district announced 115 slots for incoming open enrollment students — but none for children with disabilities.

The denials tie students to their home district school, underscoring how a child’s ZIP code shapes opportunities. The effect is compounded for students with disabilities.

More via the Wisconsin coalition for education freedom.




Wisconsin spelling bee champ ends Scripps National Spelling Bee run as semifinalist



Kimberly Wethal

Middleton speller Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya has accomplished his personal goal of placing higher at the Scripps National Spelling Bee than his last time there.

Aiden ended his run at the national bee tied with another competitor for 21st as he incorrectly defined “obivate” in the seventh round. Nailing the silent “c” at the start of “ctenidium” in the sixth round, Aiden survived a grueling semifinals round Wednesday that knocked out 34 of 56 competitors.

Getting to the point where the competition was using the Merriam-Webster dictionary as its source material, rather than the spelling bee’s own list, was exciting, Aiden said Wednesday.

“Being able to study and memorize the 4,000 words on one of the champion lists given is one thing, but being able to identify and break down words from anywhere in the 500,000-plus words in the dictionary is another thing,” he said. “I just find it really fun to decode the word.”




How the Teachers Union Broke Public Education



Alex Gutentag:

What makes the NEA’s bargaining approach so remarkable is the fact that this union and its counterpart, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have recently inflicted profound racial and social injustice on the country’s school children in the form of extended school closures.

As an Oakland public school teacher, I was a staunch supporter of the teachers union and was a union representative at my school for three years. In 2020, however, I began to disagree with the union when it prevented me from returning to my classroom long after studies proved that school reopening was safe, even without COVID-19 mitigation measures. In my experience, the union’s actions were not motivated by sincere fears, but rather by a desire to virtue-signal and maintain comfortable work-from-home conditions.

Although union bosses like Randi Weingarten continue to obfuscate their role in school closures, the historical record is clear: The union repeatedly pushed to keep schools closed, and areas with greater union influence kept schools closed longer. Politicians, public health officials, and the media certainly had a hand in this fiasco, but the union egged on dramatic news stories, framed school reopening as a partisan issue, and directly interfered in CDC recommendations. Teachers saw firsthand that virtual learning was a farce and that children were suffering. While there may be plenty of blame to go around, teachers’ abandonment of their own students was a special kind of betrayal.

I am well aware that there were many problems plaguing public education before school closures, and that teaching was a challenging and exhausting job. Today, however, the crisis teachers face is an order of magnitude worse than it was in 2019, and this crisis is almost entirely self-inflicted. Public school enrollment is plummeting, kids are refusing to go to school, and disciplinary problems are spiraling out of control.

Many districts are in freefall. In Baltimore, one high school student told the local news that, “The rising number of violence within city public schools has been unfathomable.” More than 80% of U.S. schools have reported an increase in behavior issues. Nearly half of all schools have teacher shortages, and teachers continue to leave in droves.

Nationally, the chronic absence rate doubled, and it is not showing signs of improvement. In one San Francisco elementary school, almost 90% of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year. In New York City, 50% of all Black students and 47% of all Latino students were chronically absent. Parents have no idea how far behind their kids really are, and schools cannot repair learning loss on a mass scale because the available workforce is simply not up to the task.




Political indoctrination? Here is what goes on in my UW classroom



Katherine Cramer:

nal paper: “My conception of what being a good citizen is has greatly evolved over the course of [our course]…I now think that it’s even more necessary to not just understand your own opinions, but also those of other people. Too often, we see politicians, media elites, and even citizens weaponizing our differences as political ammunition for one side or the other instead of appreciating the various perspectives. It certainly takes a lot of conscious effort to approach political discourse with an open mind and resist the urge to argue during the charged political environment we live in, but I’ve come to understand that this is a crucial step in creating a well-functioning democracy.”

Perhaps rather than worry that students on UW campuses are being indoctrinated, we instead should listen to them and follow their lead: Don’t believe everything you hear or read. Take the time to listen to people and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps most importantly, enjoy the feeling of people treating each other with respect.




Notes on mentoring



Matthew A. Kraft, Alexander J. Bolves, and Noelle M. Hurd:

We document a largely unrecognized pathway through which schools promote human capital development – by fostering informal mentoring relationships between students and teachers, counselors, and coaches. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents, we explore the nature and consequences of natural mentoring relationships by leveraging within-student variation in the timing of mentorship formation as well as differences in exposure among pairs of twins, best friends, and romantic partners. Results across difference-in-differences and pair fixed-effect specifications show consistent and meaningful positive effects on student attainment, with a conservative estimate of a 9.4 percentage point increase in college attendance. Effects are largest for students of lower socioeconomic status and robust to controls for individual characteristics and bounding exercises for selection on unobservables. Smaller class sizes and a school culture where students have a strong sense of belonging are important school-level predictors of having a K-12 natural mentor.




Notes on mentoring



Matthew A. Kraft, Alexander J. Bolves, and Noelle M. Hurd:

We document a largely unrecognized pathway through which schools promote human capital development – by fostering informal mentoring relationships between students and teachers, counselors, and coaches. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents, we explore the nature and consequences of natural mentoring relationships by leveraging within-student variation in the timing of mentorship formation as well as differences in exposure among pairs of twins, best friends, and romantic partners. Results across difference-in-differences and pair fixed-effect specifications show consistent and meaningful positive effects on student attainment, with a conservative estimate of a 9.4 percentage point increase in college attendance. Effects are largest for students of lower socioeconomic status and robust to controls for individual characteristics and bounding exercises for selection on unobservables. Smaller class sizes and a school culture where students have a strong sense of belonging are important school-level predictors of having a K-12 natural mentor.




Notes on Writing



Matt Taibbi:

Rule #1: When you think you’re finished, go back and kill 20% of your copy.

Soviet writer Isaac Babel, a fan of what the Dude called “the whole brevity thing,” said a key was using “strong fingers” and “whipcord nerves” to remove parts “you happen to like most, but are needed least.” Babel added writing was “like self-inficted torture” and wondered why he didn’t follow his father into the farm machinery business. You’ll see that sentiment a lot. Most people who actually like writing, overwrite. When you think you’re finished, check the word count. If it’s 1800, target 360 for termination. Your real length is probably 1200, but a 20% kill is a start. Nobody has a 100% smart rate, least of all you. Learn to enjoy it. If loved ones walk in the room during this process, they should see a schizoid gleam in your eye that makes them nervous.




Standardized exams measure intrinsic ability, not racial or socioeconomic privilege



Milky Eggs:

Typically, the disadvantaged groups (exam scores underestimate ability) are thought to be poor, Black, Hispanic, or Native American students, and the advantaged groups (exam scores overestimate ability) are thought to be Asian-Americans.

These motivations are wrong.

However, it is important to be clear about why they are wrong. They are not wrong because I disagree with them on an ideological basis; rather, they are wrong because they conflict with the existing scientific literature on cognitive ability, the heritability of intelligence, and standardized testing. They are empirically wrongand run against decades’ worth of detailed studies spanning the fields of psychology, sociology, education, and modern genetics.

In this post, I outline a clear, step-by-step argument that lays out a strong case for the pro-standardized testing viewpoint. I establish the following points:

  1. Intelligence is measured by a single factor, g
  2. The majority of differences in intelligence are genetic
  3. Common objections to heritability estimates are invalid
  4. Standardized test scores are good measures of intelligence
  5. Test scores are unaffected by parental income or education
  6. Test preparation has a minimal effect on test scores
  7. Asian culture does not explain Asian-American exam outperformance



Does watching videos with natural scenery restore attentional resources? A critical examination through a pre-registered within-subject experiment.



Hartanto, Andree Lee Anne Teo, Nicole Lua, Verity Y. Q. Tay, Keith J. Y. Chen, Nicole R. Y. Majeed, Nadyanna M.:

Existing studies have shown that direct exposure to a real nature environment has a restorative effect on attentional resources after a mentally fatiguing task. However, it remains unclear whether virtual nature simulations can serve as a substitute for real nature experienced in the outdoors to restore executive attention. Given the mixed findings in the literature, the present study sought to examine if viewing videos with natural scenery (vs. a control with urban scenery) restores participants’ working memory capacity—measured by an operation span task—in a high-powered pre-registered within-subject experimental study. Overall, our within-subject experiment did not find any evidence to support the benefit of watching videos with natural scenery on restoration of executive attention. Moreover, the results from our Bayesian analyses further showed substantial support for the null hypothesis. Our study suggests that virtual nature simulations, even with the use of videos, may not be able to replicate the experiences of nature in the outdoors and restore attentional resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)




English Departments “are really dying”



B Davis:

Reading Mr. Phelps recent article, “Are English Departments Really Dying”, I was surprised by the conclusions he drew from the data he referenced at the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). He tells us, essentially, that the degrees/departments aren’t really dying, but that undergraduate emphasis is shifting from the ‘pure’ / traditional English degree to “more applied, vocational, and skill-based programs.”

I was surprised because this does not really align with my own understanding of the crash & burn we see in the humanities.

So I checked the numbers, using the table he referenced.

And I was surprised all over again to discover what seems to be significant arithmetic errors in Mr. Phelps’ calculations.

He tells us, as an example, that “English bachelor’s degree completion declined from about 7.6 percent of all degrees in 1971 to about 4.3 percent in 2021.” The 7.6% is correct, dividing 63K degrees in English by 839K degrees overall in 1971. But if we divide the English degrees awarded in ’21 (35,762) by the total degrees in ’21 (2,066,445) we find that only 1.7% of all degrees that year were in “English Language & Literature”. (That probably explains the New Yorker’s use of the phrase ‘freefall’ ).




More on Wisconsin School Choice Governance, freedom of speech, civil rights and freedom of religion



Phoebe Petrovic:

Wisconsin Watch reviewed public materials for about one-third of the state’s 373 voucher schools and found that four out of 10 had policies or statements that appeared to target LGBTQ+ students for disparate treatment. Some had explicitly discriminatory policies, such as expelling students for being gay or transgender. 

All 50 of the voucher schools with anti-LGBTQ+ stances identified by the news organization are Christian, with denominations including Lutherans and Catholics, among others. Almost every school cites religious principles as a basis for their positions.

Suzanne Eckes, an education law professor at University of Madison-Wisconsin, argued that language casting gay or transgender identities or behavior as sinful, even without policies codifying the perspective, “has a discriminatory intent behind it.”

She also pointed out how some policies, although not explicit, could result in LGBTQ+ students being treated inconsistently from others. For example, some schools specifically ban all sexual contact outside of a straight, cisgender marriage.

Green Bay Adventist Junior Academy, which has nearly 68% of students on vouchers, says that it “does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation (in admissions), but does discriminate on the basis of sexual misconduct,” which includes “homosexual conduct.” Reached by phone, a representative of the school said: “We have no comment.”

Werth, now approaching graduation from college, said his experience, although difficult, was not as hostile as the policies now in place at his alma mater and elsewhere.

It would be useful to compare $pending on traditional public schools and the voucher budget…

More:

Curious (false claims) reporting on legacy k-12 schools, charter/voucher models and special education via Wisconsin coalition for education freedom.

A “Wisconsin Watch” look at voucher schools; DPI heavy, no mention of $pending or achievement…

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Pay Teachers, Not Administrators



Frederick Hess:

Democrats need to placate a host of entrenched claimants. This means that they’re all for pumping money into schools, but they do so in ways that tend to further bloat bureaucracies, pad payrolls, and supersize benefits rather than increase paychecks, reward hard work, or honor excellence.

The public thinks teachers deserve a raise. Last year, 72 percent of respondents to the annual Education Next survey said that teacher salaries should be higher, and just 4 percent said they should be lower. (Among Republicans, the split was 56 percent to 7 percent.) Even when told how much teachers in their state earn (which is invariably more than expected), respondents broke 60 percent to 4 percent for higher pay.

The public has a point. The National Education Association reported this spring that, in 2021–22, the average teacher’s salary was $66,745. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics has it a bit higher, at $67,680 as of May 2021, but I’ll use the NEA figure here.) Sixty-six grand isn’t peanuts, but it is below the $70,000 median for college graduates in all fields. To attract and retain the kinds of educators we want, we should aim to pay teachers more than the typical college grad makes. Another recent survey asked teachers how much they think teachers should earn. The median response was $80,000.

As I note in The Great School Rethink, communities benefit when teachers are capable and professionally compensated. And, contrary to union talking points, there’s no evidence that cheapskate taxpayers are the problem when it comes to directing money at public education. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk, the landmark 1983 report of the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education, per pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has doubled. In 2019 (even before the massive infusion of federal pandemic aid), U.S. schools spent $16,774 per student.

But it can be unclear what taxpayers are getting for their money. Nationally, student achievement has been stagnant for a decade. Adding insult to injury, increases in school spending over time have done nothing to quiet concerns about teacher pay. Between 2012 and 2022, inflation-adjusted teacher pay fell by close to 4 percent even as real per pupil spending increased by 16 percent. In fact, falling pay and rising spending have been a pattern since the Clinton era. Why aren’t more dollars translating into more pay? Key culprits include the number of nonteaching staff, outsized benefits, and a truncated employee year.




The state capital of reading problems, Milwaukee Public Schools looks at how to turn things around



Alan Borsuk:

Year after year, MPS reading scores are abysmal, strong signs of the problems with educational success that lie ahead for many students. There are bright spots; some MPS schools consistently have better results.

But overall, in spring 2022 — the most recent results available — more than half (54.1%) of MPS third- through eighth-graders were rated “below basic” in reading on Wisconsin’s Forward tests, while 26.2% were at the basic level and 14.1% were rated proficient or advanced. Another 5.6% didn’t take the tests. Among Black students, 7% were advanced or proficient and 64.7% were below basic. In some schools, fewer than 2% of students were proficient and none were advanced.

It is fair and important to note that the overall success of students in private, parochial and charter schools generally wasn’t much different, although some schools stand out for above-average success year after year.

Specifically, in spring 2022 results for Milwaukee students using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools, 41% were rated as below basic, 32% as basic, and 19% as proficient or advanced. The voucher percentages include ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade students.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Dane County Madison Public Health Mandates and the high school class of 2023



Scott Girard:

“I’d been looking forward to high school and it was so hyped up,” said West High School senior Alex Vakar. “It felt like this necessary period for growth because people always talk about them being the best days of their lives, and we missed out on half of that.”

Dances, sports, time with friends, theater performances — all of them were canceled or altered at some point over the past four years, and that’s just outside the classroom. The interruption to students’ learning was severe, and even while virtual learning was a positive for some, students noticed missing foundational pieces when they returned to in-person classes.

That environment faced a sudden change on the afternoon of March 13, 2020, as district officials announced an extended spring break, and later that afternoon Gov. Tony Evers closed schools statewide.

“Of course, we’re freshmen in high school, we’re like, ‘Let’s go! It’s an extra week!’” Mueller said. “Initially we were all just super excited for it because we didn’t know enough about it.”

No one knew how long it would last.

“When I heard that we were closing down and school was shutting down, I was in my geometry class and my teacher just said, ‘Hopefully I’ll see you next week,’” Vakar recalled.

Reality quickly set in, as the wait for a return kept being extended and the school district tried to formulate a plan to continue students’ learning. That spring, MMSD began virtual learning but switched to a “pass/no pass” grading system for high schoolers and froze grade point averages at their first semester level.

Vakar grew increasingly frustrated with MMSD as she saw peers in surrounding school districts return while Madison remained virtual. When Vakar returned in spring 2021 to a limited schedule at West, as the district phased in in-person instruction and a hybrid schedule, she noticed the differences from fall 2019: masking, one-way hallways and one class in which she “was completely alone with the teacher” while the rest of the class was on Zoom.

Dane County Madison Public Health Notes and links.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Boston now spends more per student than any other large school district in the nation



James Vaznis:

Boston Public Schools spends more per student than any other large school district in the country, according to the latest figures from the US Census Bureau, a new distinction that reflects how BPS’s budget keeps growing even as student enrollment continues to decline.

The city’s highest-in-the-nation cost, of $31,397 per student during the 2020-21 school year, represented a nearly 13 percent increase from the previous year, or about $3,600 more per student, according to the census, which examined spending in the country’s 100 largest districts.

During that same period, BPS enrollment dropped by about 2,500 students, according to the state’s annual Oct. 1 head count.Yet for all the money BPS is spending, many education advocates, parents, and students are bewildered at how little the district generally has to show for it. State standardized test scores are low, huge gaps in achievement exist between students of different backgrounds, and the district had to aggressively fight off a state takeover last year.

Madison taxpayers spend about $26K per student, far more than most, though not as much as Boston.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




The Empire of Racial Preferences Strikes Back



William McGurn:

Any day now, the Supreme Court will issue landmark rulings on the constitutionality and statutory compliance of using racial preferences in college admissions. And already the empire is fighting back.

No place is more in­sti­tu­tion­ally in­vested in us­ing race to de­ter­mine out­comes than our col­lege cam­puses. The bet­ting is that the high court will come down against what the chief jus­tice once called the “sor­did busi­ness” of “divvy­ing us up by race.” But the uni­ver­si­ties are even now plan­ning work-arounds that will al­low them to con­tinue to do what they’ve been do­ing—al­beit in a sneakier way.

The two cases in­volve a pri­vate school, Har­vard, and a pub­lic one, the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina. Stu­dents for Fair Ad­mis­sions sued both, claim­ing Har­vard dis­crim­i­nated against Asian-Amer­i­can ap­pli­cants and UNC dis­crim­i­nated against both Asians and whites. When the court took the case, Lau­rence Tribe told the Har­vard Crim­son that even if the uni­ver­sity lost, not much would change.




When I teach five-year-olds the subject they typically scream with excitement. Here’s how to stop maths-phobia setting in



Eugenia Cheng:

The basic problem, in my view, is that in our haste to convey content – fractions, percentages, algorithms – we don’t pay enough attention to feelings. Typical curriculums fail to imbue children with a love and appreciation of maths. This is not the teachers’ fault – the education system judges students on performance, not enjoyment. However, if we focus on content at the expense of feelings then that content is unlikely to stick. Worse, we end up producing maths-phobic or maths-sceptical people who then find it difficult to apply important logical and quantitative reasoning techniques in the real world. Just how dangerous this can be became clear during the pandemic. In the early days, people who did not understand exponentials thought that predictions of future widespread infection were just fearmongering. Later on, the fact that there were a large number of infections among vaccinated people was interpreted by some as a sign they weren’t working – rather than exactly what you would expect if the majority of the population had received their jabs.

As scientist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago, I’ve been teaching art students at undergraduate level for eight years. Most of them were badly put off maths at school. I ask them what they found so disagreeable, and there are clear recurring themes: memorisation, especially of times tables, timed tests, right-and-wrong answers, and being made to feel stupid for making mistakes. Often they felt alienated because they had searching questions – such as why does -(-1)=1; do numbers exist; is maths real – but they were told these were silly or irrelevant, and they should get back to their repetitive, algorithmic homework assignments.

When five-year-olds first encounter maths, it’s as a creative, open-ended activity, involving play and exploration

I sometimes think that the current educational approach turns so many people off that it would be better not to teach maths at all, because at least then we’d be having no effect rather than a negative one. Prime minister Rishi Sunak has a point when he says we have an “anti-maths” culture, but he is wrong to think we can improve the situation by extending compulsory maths to 18. The last thing we need is more years of trauma-inducing maths lessons. Those who like it already carry on with it, so we’d just be forcing the disillusioned to continue studying something they don’t enjoy.




Even if the Supreme Court rules against using race in college admissions, some schools plan to ignore it.



William McGurn:

No place is more in­sti­tu­tion­ally in­vested in us­ing race to de­ter­mine out­comes than our col­lege cam­puses. The bet­ting is that the high court will come down against what the chief jus­tice once called the “sor­did busi­ness” of “divvy­ing us up by race.” But the uni­ver­si­ties are even now plan­ning work-arounds that will al­low them to con­tinue to do what they’ve been do­ing—al­beit in a sneakier way.

The two cases in­volve a pri­vate school, Har­vard, and a pub­lic one, the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina. Stu­dents for Fair Ad­mis­sions sued both, claim­ing Har­vard dis­crim­i­nated against Asian-Amer­i­can ap­pli­cants and UNC dis­crim­i­nated against both Asians and whites. When the court took the case, Lau­rence Tribe told the Har­vard Crim­son that even if the uni­ver­sity lost, not much would change.

“Uni­ver­si­ties as in­tel­li­gent as Har­vard will find ways of deal­ing with the de­ci­sion with­out rad­i­cally al­ter­ing their com­po­si­tion,” the Har­vard Law pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus told the Crim­son. “But they will have to be more sub­tle than they have been thus far.”




“Diversity and inclusion doesn’t belong in the maths curriculum”



John Armstrong:

In March, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) – an independent body which oversees standards and quality in UK universities – released new guidance on curriculum design in mathematics. This guidance states:

‘Values of EDI [Equality Diversity and Inclusion] should permeate the curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience.’

At least on the face of it, this guidance seems odd. University lecturers are not teaching racist courses on calculus or sexist proofs of the prime number theorem. There is, therefore, no need for the QAA to tell them that they shouldn’t do this.

Can saying 2+2=4 be racist? Astonishingly, there is a hardcore of postmodernists who would say that it can. One such argument is: human knowledge can never be perfect; rational argument is only one way of knowing; rational argument was promoted in the enlightenment as a means of denigrating indigenous ways of knowing and oppressing colonised peoples; therefore saying that 2+2=4 smacks of white supremacy. This is a fringe view, but it is a real one. An historian speaking at the London Mathematical Society this week sincerely proposed that we should question the claim that 2+2=4, though she did not expand on her reasons.

Nevertheless, the majority of those calling for an EDI overhaul of mathematics are not seeking to change mathematics only the mindset of mathematics students. This though is in many ways even more alarming.

University lecturers are not teaching racist courses on calculus or sexist proofs of the prime number theorem




The True Story of UNC-Chapel Hill’s New School



Perrin Jones:

Last month, UNC-Chapel Hill faculty penned an open letter airing criticism of both the North Carolina General Assembly and the UNC Board of Trustees. Among their complaints was the allegation that the proposed new School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) is a “clear violation” of governance principles.

But the faculty don’t have the full story. More of the truth is finally coming out about the proposed school at UNC-Chapel Hill, my alma mater, where I am a member of the Board of Trustees.

The idea for the new school’s pro-democracy curriculum goes back years—and has involved faculty input from the beginning, contrary to the false narrative perpetuated by political partisans and other opponents of free and open learning and debate on campus.

The idea for the new school’s pro-democracy curriculum goes back years—and has involved faculty input from the beginning.

As confirmed publicly by Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Provost Christopher Clemens, the administration’s proposal for SCiLL grew out of Carolina’s Program for Public Discourse and its IDEAs in Action curriculum, which themselves arose from campus discussions dating back to 2017. Their aims were to promote open, civil debate on campus and to equip students for success in our diverse nation and world.




Campaigns Take Notice of Moms for Liberty



Eliza Collins:

Schools rely on only about 10% of federal funding, and funding decisions must first be approved by Congress, giving the executive branch less power than presidential candidates often campaign on, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

DeSantis has held listening sessions over pizza and barbeque with Moms for Liberty members in the general election battleground states of Michigan and Georgia. Earlier this year, he met with Moms for Liberty founders to discuss endorsements for school-board candidates and spoke at their summit last year. Trump’s team offered a chance for members of Iowa chapters to take a photo with him and reserved special seating for them at an event.

Scott’s team reached out to Wood and Dixon ahead of his campaign launch and asked them to bring friends, the two said. A Scott-aligned group donated to a fundraiser held by the Charleston chapter, and he frequently talks during appearances about education and his push to expand school choice.

Vivek Ramaswamy, founder of a biopharmaceutical company, has held town-hall gatherings with Moms for Liberty members in Iowa and South Carolina. Ramaswamy said he signed the group’s parent pledge, a promise to push the issue, “to provide empowerment to parents and to moms in particular across the country who are concerned about their kids’ education.”




A curious Bezos Washington Post take on homeschooling



Peter Jamison:

Across the country, interest in home schooling has never been greater. The Bealls could see the surge in Virginia, where nearly 57,000 children were being home-schooled in the fall of 2022 — a 28 percent jump from three years earlier. The rise of home education, initially unleashed by parents’ frustrations with pandemic-related campus closures and remote learning, has endured as one of the lasting social transformations wrought by covid-19.

But if the coronavirus was a catalyst for the explosion in home schooling, the stage was set through decades of painstaking work by true believers like those who had raised Aaron and Christina. Aided by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a Christian nonprofit that has been dubbed “the most influential homeschool organization in the world,” and is based less than five miles from the Bealls’ house in Northern Virginia — those activists had fought to establish the legality of home schooling in the 1980s and early 1990s, conquering the skepticism of public school administrators and state lawmakers across the country.

Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.

## I’ve known a number of people who chose home schooling. In many cases, academic rigor was a significant factor. Religion was for some as well.

Perhaps these links might offer a bit of background:

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Notes on Harvard’s Censorship Journal



Mike Benz:

SUMMARY

  • Harvard’s in-house censorship journal published an article declaring the field of “mis- and disinformation studies” to be “too big to fail” and “here to stay.”​
  • Citing government funding to academic departments who study how to optimize online censorship, the Harvard magazine embraced language from the 2008 financial crisis language reserved for major banks.
  • The Harvard authors openly acknowledged the troubling links between today’s censorship regime and civil liberties violations during 1950s Cold War propaganda efforts.

“The field of mis- and disinformation studies is here to stay.” So declares the opening line of a report titled “Mis- and disinformation studies are too big to fail: Six suggestions for the field’s future,” published last September by the Harvard Misinformation Review, housed within the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy and Government. 

“Disinformation studies” is academic speak for online censorship. As the Harvard report itself concedes, the field was born “after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—arguably catalysts for the emergence of the field.” That is, per Harvard, the involvement of US academics in online censorship happened as a reactionary response to right-wing populist political success on both sides of the Atlantic. 

As a technical matter, “disinformation studies” is a merger of social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology) and computer sciences (AI, machine learning, network theory), each converging on a common target (law-abiding citizens) to censor on social media. University social science teams conduct a “network mapping” of so-called “misinformation communities” online for takedown, and their findings are converted into specific algorithm targets by the university computer science teams.




Legislation and reading results



https://www.teachingbyscience.com/sor-laws

This article continues on with our series on what percentage of students can reach grade level, as most typically defined by either the 30th percentile on a norm referenced assessment or the basic benchmark on the NAEP test. In previous articles we showed that 97.5% of students could achieve grade level standards if three conditions were met:




High school graduates choose jobs and turn away from college



Harriett Torry

More high-school grad­u­ates are be­ing di­verted from col­lege cam­puses by brighter prospects for blue-col­lar jobs in a his­tor­i­cally strong la­bor mar­ket for less-ed­u­cated work­ers.

The col­lege en­roll­ment rate for re­cent U.S. high-school grad­u­ates, ages 16 to 24, de­clined to 62% last year from 66.2% in 2019, just be­fore the pan­demic be­gan, ac­cord­ing to the lat­est La­bor De­part­ment data. The rate topped out at 70.1% in 2009.

Job growth at restau­rants, theme parks and other parts of the leisure and hos­pi­tal­ity sec­tor—which tend to em­ploy young peo­ple and typ­i­cally don’t re­quire a col­lege de­gree—has in­creased more than twice as fast as job gains over­all in the past year. There also re­mains a high num­ber of job open­ings in con­struc­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ing and ware­hous­ing, fields that of­ten re­quire ad­di­tional train­ing, but not col­lege de­grees.




Troy School Board eliminates middle school honors math classes despite parent outrage



Niraj Warikoo:

As the father of twin boys with differing academic abilities, Krit Patel, of Troy, said honors classes are helpful in improving the learning of all students.

“I love them equally,” Patel said of his twins in middle school. “They’re not academically on the same end of the spectrum. I have a son that’s a special needs student and I have a son that’s in the honors class. They are not equal. They should not be in the same class. … Not all kids learn at the same speed and have the same ability.”

So when the father of four children in Troy Public Schools heard the district had canceled its honors English program for ninth graders and was planning to end its honors-track math classes for some grades in middle school, he and others grew concerned. A petition asking the district to keep the current system garnered almost 2,900 signatures. And hundreds have jammed meetings in recent weeks voicing their opposition.

Shades of Madison’s failed English 10 expedition…




he last days of Grace King High School, a Jefferson Parish institution with famous alumni



NOLA:

Days after the final bell tolled, the yellow and green sign in front of Grace King High still bore a solemn message: “Last Day of School May 24.”

Inside the Metairie school, yearbooks, trophies and other memorabilia would be packed and taken to a warehouse for storage, until they are sold at auction. The halls were bare of the banners that once announced the home of the Fighting Irish, and the oil painting of the school’s namesake, a New Orleans writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had been removed from its place in the library.

“You take it for granted while you’re there, and then you go around the world and you see fancy things and you realize you had it pretty good,” said Khan, valedictorian of the Class of 1994. 

The Kolleens

Last month, the Jefferson School Board approved a sweeping plan to close Grace King and five other schools, and relocate two others. Haynes Academy, a magnet school in Old Metairie, will shift into the Grace King building. Would-be Grace King students will be split between Bonnabel Magnet Academy High School in Kenner and Riverdale High in Old Jefferson.




“A Partner at a Big Firm … Received Memos with Fake Case Cites from … Two Different Associates”



Eugene Volokh:

A message I got from Prof. Dennis Crouch (Missouri), in response to my posting A Lawyer’s Filing “Is Replete with Citations to Non-Existent Cases”—Thanks, ChatGPT? to an academic discussion list. (The full text was, “I just talked to a partner at a big firm who has received memos with fake case cites from at least two different associates.”) Caveat emp…—well, caveat everyone.




Notes on taxpayer funded efforts to suppress academic religious freedom



Rob Jenkins:

Despite a couple of recent, high-profile legal victories for religious freedom, the Biden administration is not abandoning its attacks on faith-based organizations—including religious colleges and universities, as well as religious groups on public campuses. Quite the contrary. The administration, undeterred, continues its long-term strategy of whittling away at religious liberties rather than confronting them head-on.

Before we explore that strategy, let’s first take a moment to celebrate the wins. For those of us engaged in this battle, who often feel like we’re fighting a rearguard action against an overwhelming foe, it’s important to recognize that we are not, in fact, always losing. The courts, at least, appear to be on our side—for now.

Our most notable recent victory, perhaps, is the dismissal, in January, of a lawsuit against the Department of Education claiming religious exemptions to Title IX are “unconstitutional.” The suit, filed in Oregon by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, on behalf of more than 40 plaintiffs, accused several Christian colleges of “discriminating” against “LGBTQ+” individuals.

One might think the Biden administration would give up trying to foist its agenda on religious organizations.

In her decision, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken upheld the exemption because, she said, it is “substantially related to the government’s objective of accommodating religious exercise.” She also rejected the plaintiff’s arguments that the policy runs afoul of the equal protection and establishment clauses in the U.S. Constitution.

Another case involved Brigham Young University, which was being investigated for Title IX violations after several “LGBTQ+” students there complained of discrimination. The DOE dropped its investigation last year, reaffirming BYU’s longstanding religious exemption from “various Title IX provisions to the extent that application of these provisions is not consistent with the religious tenets of the Church of Jesus Christ [of Latter-day Saints] ‘that pertain to sexual orientation and gender identity.’”




A firing at Bakersfield College shows that tenure is no match for leftist orthodoxy.



George Leef:

Every so often, one of our college leaders blurts out the truth about their feelings and beliefs. In their public pronouncements, they always try to appear reasonable, when they’re actually intolerant and belligerent.

That’s exactly what happened at Bakersfield College (BC) in California.

The story begins in 2021, when a group of faculty members at the school, disturbed at the inroads the DEI movement was making, formed the Renegade Institute for Liberty (RIL). Their purpose was “to promote diversity of thought and intellectual literacy through free and open discussion of American ideals including civil, economic, and religious freedom.” That amounted to waving a red flag in front of the DEI bull, since diversity zealots have no use for any of those concepts.

The conflict erupted last October at a meeting of the BC Equal Opportunity & Diversity Advisory Committee. History professor Matthew Garrett, who has tenure, voiced his opposition to a “racial-climate survey” on the grounds that it had been poorly done and was a weak justification for the creation of a new diversity task force that would undercut the authority of the existing committee.

Diversity zealots have no use for free and open discussion of American ideals.

An interesting detail is that members of RIL had succeeded in obtaining some of the seats on that committee by applying for them at midnight on the first day they came open. The DEI community at BC was furious, but the tactic was perfectly legitimate.

Professor Garrett had previously incurred the wrath of the BC administration. In 2019, he criticized it for improperly allocating funds, naming several of the individuals involved. BC hit back at him with an “investigation” and by alleging that he had engaged in “unprofessional conduct.” That led him to file a lawsuit over the school’s retaliation against him, which is currently pending in federal court.




Will Illinois Still ‘Invest in Kids’?



Wall Street Journal:

The program is popular with voters. In May 2021, an ARW Strategies poll showed 61% of Illinois voters approved the tax-credit program, including 67% of state Democrats. Seventy-one percent of black voters and 81% of Hispanics statewide approved of the plan.

The program’s popularity is one reason Gov. J.B. Pritzker has reversed his earlier opposition. He ran against it in 2018 but in 2022 indicated support on a Chicago Sun-Times candidate questionnaire. “With assurance from the advocates for Invest in Kids that they will support increased public school funding,” Mr. Pritzker wrote, “my budgets have ultimately included the relatively small Invest in Kids Scholarship Program.”

So why is the program in danger? The answer, as always, is pressure from the unions that dominate Illinois politics, including the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the Illinois Education Association and the Chicago Teachers Union.




Notes on IQ results



Human Varieties:

In our manuscript, titled “Reply to Warne,” we present average eduPGS and NIH Toolbox composite scores from the ABCD study, categorized by ethnic and religious groups. In our analyses, we used unweighted means instead of sample weighted scores, since we were only interested in the correlation between mean eduPGS and cognitive ability. However, we also computed weighted NIH Toolbox scores, which may be of interest to some readers.

These scores were computed using the surveypackage for R as recommended by Heeringa and Berglund (2020). These weighted scores, reported below, represent the “neuropsychological performance” scores, measured between 2016 and 2018, of representative samples of 10-year-old American children. The first three columns, after the group labels, display the sample size, means, and standard deviations, respectively. The fourth column presents the scores normalized with the non-Hispanic White mean set to 100.00 and standard deviations set to 15.00. To norm scores, we pooled the standard deviations across all groups (pooled SD= 16.39) and transformed the values using the pooled SD. On a reader request, I added average years of parental education, which I previously outputted, in the fifth column.

The ethnic groups are mutually exclusive, and the specific variables used to code them are provided in the supplementary materials of the manuscript. Classifications are based on the race/ethnicity of the child as reported by the responding parent in conjunction with the nationality and immigrant status of the parents; see the Parent Demographics Survey for specific variables and the second table for definitions. To be clear, some of the definitions do not perfectly overlap with ones commonly used in the social sciences. For example, the classification “USA Blacks” refers to children who were identified as being Black, not being White, not being Hispanic, but also not having an immigrant parent or grandparent. This was done because, when computing the scores, we were interested in mutually exclusive ethnocultural groups.




The Department of Education’s “Secret Shoppers”



Grace Hall:

Students around the country pay top dollar and take on mountains of debt to earn a degree. They hope doing so will pay dividends in the future. But some colleges and universities misrepresent themselves, or even outright lie. After all, what school doesn’t want to separate students from their money? Enter the U.S. Department of Education, which is attempting to crack down on these colleges with a tool straight out of the retail industry: secret shoppers.

Secret shoppers have been a means of evaluating customer service for decades. When businesses want to know if their employees are providing excellent goods and services in the manner employers wish, they can hire secret shoppers to experience what the average customer gets, then report back.

The current U.S. Department of Education announced in March that the enforcement division of the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) will henceforth use this same tool to ensure that schools are not lying to students about key facts such as graduation rates, the transferability of credits, future earning potential, career services, and the cost of attendance.

The Biden administration is attempting to crack down on schools that lie to potential students.

The Education Department will not focus on for-profit schools alone; however, these schools are often criticized for doing exactly what the secret-shopper program is hoping to stop. The Biden administration is attempting to crack down on schools that lie to potential students, especially ones that take advantage of federal student aid programs.

Secret-shopper findings may be used as evidence to support investigations into schools suspected of fraud. The FSA is also focused on protecting military students. According to the Education Department, schools that are treating students fairly have nothing to fear, while schools that engage in misconduct and fraud should be nervous. As Kristen Donoghue, FSA’s chief enforcement officer, said, “Schools that engage in fraud … are on notice that we may be listening, and they should clean up accordingly.”




Notes on the tuition bubble



Zachary Marshall

Hereditary ailments are a useful comparison to understand the current problems with American higher education. Doctors can trace patients’ family medical histories to approximate higher risks for diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. A patient’s genealogy impacts how that individual lives today. 

Similarly, the genealogy of the university, as a Western social institution, helps explain how colleges came to be disposed to structural ailments. 

From a genealogical perspective, the institutional liberal bias that Campus Reform covers is in large part due to higher education’s historically complex, often love-hate relationship with capitalism. Universities have come to love the free market when alumni donations, football franchises, and new flagship buildings suit them. But in many ways, they also refuse to operate as a business – even a non-profit one – and posture that responding to market forces is beneath them when either popular criticism or overspending hit.

The bottom line: American colleges and universities have a relationship of convenience to free market capitalism because they are genealogically pre-capitalist institutions. And that historical legacy accounts for how they indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies.




High school reschedules graduation ceremony due to only 5 seniors found eligible to graduate



Alex Fulton and Jordan Gartner

According to an audit from the district, 28 of 33 seniors at Marlin High School did not meet the graduation requirements due to their attendance or grades.

“We hold firm to our belief that every student in Marlin ISD can and will achieve their potential,” said Superintendent Darryl Henson. “Students will be held to the same high standard as any other student in Texas.”




Debates over deferments and debt relief raise similar questions about education and democracy.



Michael Toth:

The Supreme Court is considering the fate of President Biden’s student-loan cancellation plan. The economic significance of the case is obvious: If the court holds that it is lawful, it will transfer more than $400 billion from taxpayers to student borrowers. Even more significant is the foundational question at the heart of the debate: What privileges, if any, should higher education receive in a democratic society?

It’s a question that was once carefully considered by leading political and educational leaders, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower (who served as Columbia University’s president, 1948-53) and James Conant (Harvard’s president, 1933-53). The broader context of the mid-20th-century debate over educational privilege was student deferments from the military draft. It’s a useful analogy for today’s debate, and it illustrates how higher-education interests succeeded decades ago in creating a privileged place above the ordinary duties of American civic life.

The U.S. instituted the draft in 1940, more than a year before Congress declared war on Japan and Germany. FDR, who came out for the draft at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, championed universal military service by able-bodied males as an expression of national unity and democratic solidarity. On the day of the first draft lottery, Roosevelt read, with great fanfare, from letters written by Catholic, Jewish and Protestant leaders in support of conscription.




Let’s not write people off as “ai losers”



Sarah O’Connor:

But Swedish unions hope it will “make our members safer in the labour market and more resistant to destructive forces that are always at work in a small open economy,” says Fredrik Söderqvist, an economist for the LO — the Swedish trade union confederation. “This sort of highlights a basic tenet of the Swedish model — security in the labour market is supposed to bring security in the individual job — not the other way around.”

It’s time to stop saying AI will produce winners and losers, as if the whole thing is out of our hands. It creates opportunities and dangers. How they play out is up to us.




Arrested for handing out the Constitution



Rachel Culver:

Tizon, a student at the time of the incident, was arrested by the ASU Police Department on March 3, 2022.

In January of this year, Liberty Justice Center, which represents Tizon, appealed the conviction.

A brief in his defense argued that the Arizona Forum Act defines all public areas of the ASU campus as public forums in which students are free to express their own message, even controversial ones.

Following his arrest, Tizon said through his attorneys: “Universities are supposed to be the epicenter of the marketplace of ideas.”

“ASU has let me down and every other student too by placing its bureaucracy ahead of our First Amendment rights.”




IRS investigated Matt Taibbi as he was revealing government censorship on Twitter



Karl Salzmann:

The IRS targeted journalist Matt Taibbi on two occasions while he was exposing information about censorship efforts by the government and Twitter.

The agency launched an investigation into Taibbi, a liberal journalist who has criticized left-wing censorship of conservative and moderate voices, on December 24, 2022, according to a Wednesday letterfrom House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio). On that same day, Taibbi was publishing some of the “Twitter Files,” internal Twitter emails that show the company coordinating with the government to censor so-called misinformation.

Just months later, on March 9, 2023, Taibbi was testifying in Congress when an IRS agent visited his home. The agency was performing “an extensive investigation” of Taibbi, looking into the journalist’s “voter registration records, whether he possessed a hunting or fishing license, whether he had a concealed weapons permit, and his telephone numbers,” Jordan’s letter revealed.

The investigation, which ostensibly concerned Taibbi’s 2018 tax filing, ultimately concluded that Taibbi “did not owe the IRS anything,” according to the letter. On the contrary, the IRS owed Taibbi “a substantial refund.”




Notes on University Governance



Molly Worthen:

Nery Rodriguez just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in economics, but one of the most significant courses she took there had nothing to do with marginal utility or game theory. When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as “the monk class,” she wasn’t sure what to expect.

“You give up technology and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.

On the first day of class — officially called Living Deliberately — Justin McDaniel, a professor of Southeast Asian and religious studies, reviewed the rules. Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.

Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer. (Dr. McDaniel offers to talk to any instructors, employers or relatives who have concerns.)




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Fiat Currency edition



Alex Carp:

“Congress screwed up,” Beowulf wrote. By passing the law, it had given the president the authority to direct the secretary of the Treasury to mint a coin of any value — say, $1 trillion — and deposit it in the Federal Reserve, which would be legally obligated to accept it. Ultimately, the coin’s deposit would result in $1 trillion in government revenue or, with a coin of a different denomination, however much was needed to continue to pay its bills and avoid a default. “The catch is, it’s gotta be made of platinum,” Beowulf wrote. “Ditto the balls of any president who tried this.”

In the time since, the idea has gained an unexpected acceptance among policymakers and economists. In 2013, Representative Jerry Nadler said that the idea “sounds silly, but it’s absolutely legal.” Shortly after, Paul Krugman asked himself in the New York Times if the president should be willing to mint the coin to avoid default. His response? “Yes, absolutely.” Phillip Diehl, a former director of the Mint and Treasury chief of staff who co-wrote the 1997 law, allowed that a coin with a specific denomination of $1 trillion was “an unintended consequence” but maintained that the possibility was always conceivable. “In principle, there is nothing new,” he has said. “Any court challenge is likely to be quickly dismissed.” In 2020, Representative Rashida Tlaib sponsored a plan to mint two coins to fund pandemic aid, and this year both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell have faced questions about using the coin to end the standoff. Each registered objections, but neither would rule it out.

As it turns out, Beowulf is not an economist or a professional policy wonk. He’s a Georgia lawyer named Carlos Mucha. “Criminal defense, shareholder disputes, a little of everything,” he told me recently. He’s a tinkerer — “Jack of all trades, master of none,” he says — and his frequent visits to the comments sections of a set of financial websites were a kind of hobby.

“What got me thinking about it was that I was reading that people were using their credit cards to buy tens of thousands of U.S. dollar coins from the Mint just to get the credit-card points,” he said. “At the time, the Mint had free shipping and handling, and since it’s from the government, the coins are tax free.” They would charge $10,000, get ten thousand one-dollar coins, and use the coins to pay off their card. This really happened — one such dollar coiner told The Wall Street Journal that he took 15,000 coins straight from the delivery truck to the trunk of his car, to more easily drive them to the bank. “You don’t have to do that too many times to get a free first-class ticket,” Mucha said.




Civics: IRS Whistleblower Defies the Biden Administration and the Media



Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in the New York Post on the most recent whistleblower coming forward to publicly accuse the Biden Administration of “slow walking” the investigation of Hunter Biden. The source of the interference with the IRS investigation, according to Gary Shapley, was the Department of Justice. It is the latest chapter in the story of “The Incredibly Shrinking Merrick Garland.”

Here is the column:

“I don’t want to do any of this.”

Those words from 14-year IRS veteran Gary Shapley may be the most important line in his CBS News interview this week.

After weeks of Democrats dismissing whistleblowers alleging the president’s administration interfered with investigations of Hunter Biden, Shapley had enough.

Putting his career and much of his life at risk, Shapley came forward to say he and others believe Hunter is being protected and identified the Justice Department as the source of the protection.

Shapley has every reason not to want to do any of this.

After all, as President Joe Biden stated last year, “No one f–ks with a Biden.”

For years, a Democrat-controlled Congress refused to investigate Biden family influence-peddling, and the press dismissed people raising Hunter’s laptop as spreading “Russian disinformation.”

The media have worked hard to minimize the blowback after acknowledging the laptop’s authenticity and the growing evidence of millions in influence-peddling.

Part of this effort at “scandal implosion” has been to dismiss any criminal charges as relatively minor tax violations unconnected to the president.

Indeed, when the president recently agreed to a rare sit-down interview, the White House chose MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.




States should embed civic content into statewide reading assessments



Ross Wiener:

The recent dismal civics and history results from the Nation’s Report Card put American democracy at risk. Eighth-graders recorded their lowest scores ever in U.S. history and the first decline in civics scores. The decreases were most dramatic for lower-performing students. Just under half of eighth-graders report taking a class primarily focused on civics, and fewer than one-third have a teacher whose primary responsibility is teaching civics. School accountability policies that emphasize reading and math scores have led to less time spent on other essential subjects.

To counter this unproductive narrowing of the curriculum, states should embed civic content into statewide reading assessments. This simple change would incentivize more attention to civic learning while making reading tests more engaging, equitable and accurate.

Just 6 percent of American middle schoolers can read an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and identify two ideas from the Constitution or Declaration of Independence that King might have been referring to. This is a symptom of the atrophy in the civic mission of schools that represents a grave danger to American democracy. Only 30 percent of millennials think a democratic government is essential, compared with 70 percent of Americans born before World War II. Most millennials say that if Russia invaded the United States, they would not fight to defend our country. These data are a wake-up call that the nation needs to recommit public schools to their foundational purpose: preparing young Americans for citizenship.




Taxpayer funded Open Records Resistance at the Madison School District



Scott Girard:

The complaint against Madison Metropolitan School District spokesperson Tim LeMonds that he fought to keep private alleges he bullied and harassed numerous employees under his management as well as members of the local media.

Filed in October 2022 by three employees, one of whom has since left the district, the complaint includes a timeline of examples of poor behavior beginning in March 2021 through early October 2022. It also includes experiences shared by former employees who are not officially part of the complaint.

The district released the complaint in response to an open records request on Friday. On Thursday, a Dane County Circuit Court judge ruled against LeMonds’ lawsuit seeking to stop that release based on concerns about the potential reputational damage it could cause. LeMonds began working in MMSD in 2019.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Missing data on UW System $pending, enrollment and redistributed taxpayer funds



Wispolitics

The report also shows Wisconsin is the only state where education revenue for two-year colleges exceeds the amount for the state’s four-year institutions. In Wisconsin, revenue for two-year colleges is 6.4 percent higher.

State higher education, executive officers association

Since 2011, FTE enrollment has declined for 11 straight years to 10.31 million in 2022. Between 2015 and 2020, these declines were less than 1.0% annually. In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a year-over-year decline of 3.2% in FTE enrollment, the largest decline since the start of the SHEF dataset in 1980. FTE enrollment continued to decline in 2022, marking the second largest drop in enrollment, with a decrease of 2.5%. As a result, public institutions enrolled 10,306,924 FTE students in 2022, down 11.6% from the peak in 2011, and only 0.4% above 2008 levels




Open Records and the taxpayer supported Madison School District



Scott Girard:

The Madison Metropolitan School District can release an employee complaint filed against its spokesperson as part of a response to an open records request, a Dane County judge ruled Thursday.

Circuit Court Judge Rhonda Lanford ruled against MMSD’s executive director for communications, Tim LeMonds, who filed a lawsuit against MMSD on March 24 asking the court to stop the release of a few documents that are responsive to an open records request.

“I do not think that the plaintiff, Mr. LeMonds, has come close to showing that the public interest of protecting his reputation outweighs the public’s right to know,” Lanford said. “Especially in a case involving the public schools and how not just investigations are conducted, but how well how they are conducted and the results of that.”

The public records request came from NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas, who requested all emails from Dec. 19, 2021, through Dec. 19, 2022, that contained her name or references to an NBC15 reporter. The district released hundreds of pages of records related to the request, but per open records law notified LeMonds that the complaint would be part of the release and allowed him time to challenge that.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




Notes on legislation and k-12 reading



Christopher Peak:

For decades, schools all over the country taught reading based on a theory cognitive scientists had debunked by the 1990s. Despite research showing it made it harder for some kids to learn, the concept was widely accepted by most educators — until recent reporting by APM Reports.

Now, state legislators and other policymakers are trying to change reading instruction, requiring it to align with cognitive science research about how children learn to read. Several of them say they were motivated by APM’s Sold a Story podcast.  

Six states passed laws to change the way reading is taught since Sold a Story was released last fall. At least a dozen other states are considering similar efforts.  

The surge in activity is part of a wave of “science of reading” bills that more than half the states passed into law over the last decade — as parents, teachers, researchers and other advocates pushed legislators to make changes. But since Sold a Story, lawmakers are taking a closer look at what curriculum schools are buying and, in some states, attempting to outlaw specific teaching methods.  

Three states had already effectively banned cueing, the discredited practice covered in Sold a Story. The cueing theory holds that beginning readers don’t need to learn how to sound out written words because they can rely on other “cues” to figure them out, like the pictures on a page or the context of the sentence. This year another 10 states are seeking bans, three of which have already passed. 

The legislative efforts come at a time when fourth-grade reading scores in the United States have declined consistently since 2015, according to a nationwide achievement measurement conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Rising costs erode buying power of Social Security earnings by 36%, report says



Nora Colomer:

Inflation is moderating, but rising costs have eroded the buying power of Social Security earnings by 36%, according to a recent study by The Senior Citizens League (TSCL). 

Older Americans that retired before 2000 would have to earn an extra $516.7 more per month or $6,200 more this year than what they are currently getting to maintain the same level of buying power as in 2000, according to the study. 

The loss of buying power comes even as Social Security cost of living adjustments increased by 8.7%, which boosted the average monthly benefit by about $140. 

While slowing from a 40-year high hit last June, inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target rate. April’s consumer price index (CPI), a measure of inflation, rose 4.9% year-over-year, a slowdown from the 5% increase in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).




The Strange Story of the Teens Behind the Mirai Botnet



Scott Shapiro:

First-year college students are understandably frustrated when they can’t get into popular upper-level electives. But they usually just gripe. Paras Jha was an exception. Enraged that upper-class students were given priority to enroll in a computer-science elective at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Paras decided to crash the registration website so that no one could enroll.

On Wednesday night, 19 November 2014, at 10:00 p.m. EST—as the registration period for first-year students in spring courses had just opened—Paras launched his first distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. He had assembled an army of some 40,000 bots, primarily in Eastern Europe and China, and unleashed them on the Rutgers central authentication server. The botnet sent thousands of fraudulent requests to authenticate, overloading the server. Paras’s classmates could not get through to register.

The next semester Paras tried again. On 4 March 2015, he sent an email to the campus newspaper, The Daily Targum: “A while back you had an article that talked about the DDoS attacks on Rutgers. I’m the one who attacked the network.… I will be attacking the network once again at 8:15 pm EST.” Paras followed through on his threat, knocking the Rutgers network offline at precisely 8:15 p.m.

On 27 March, Paras unleashed another assault on Rutgers. This attack lasted four days and brought campus life to a standstill. Fifty thousand students, faculty, and staff had no computer access from campus.




The Politics of Academic Research



Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu and Ingrid M. Werner

We develop a novel measure of political slant in research to examine whether political ideology influences the content and use of academic research. Our measure examines the frequency of citations from think tanks with different political ideologies and allows us to examine both the supply and demand for research. We find that research in Economics and Political Science displays a liberal slant, while Finance and Accounting research exhibits a conservative slant, and these differences cannot be accounted for by variations in research topics. We also find that the ideological slant of researchers is positively correlated with that of their Ph.D. institution and research conducted outside universities appears to cater more to the political party of the current President. Finally, political donations data confirms that the ideological slant we measure based on think tank citations aligns with the political values of researchers. Our findings have important implications for the structure of research funding.